By Fayez Alqahtani

Rachael Kwai Fun IP and Christian Wagner wrote a paper for the Decision Support Systems journal on 2008 about how social computing tools like blogs could have an impact on organizations. In this post I am going to review and summaries this paper

Social software like web logging is now driving the spread of virtual communities, especially among young people. Web logs and other social computing software may have increasing impact on organizational computing. Therefore, there is need to understand social computing and study the role of web log as one optional social networking tool for young people. Also, and its probable evolution to the organizational computing is essentially to be studied and analysed.

Social computing is defined as any type of computing application that serves as an intermediary or a focus for a social relation. They early weblogs may have been used largely by the type of users with an interest in journalistic reporting, weblogs nowadays are increasingly attracting young people and this will reshape the social computing in organisations by shifting from traditional way of communication like emails. Current usages of weblogs are community building, journal writing, content management and personal dairy. Via this study four types of bloggers have been defined habitual, active, personal and blogging lurker. Every one of thous bloggers has frequent number of time to access blogs every day with a particular duration time and other characteristic. Bloggers are employs and customers how are valuable resources for the organization benefits. Therefore, organizations need to find ways to address their customers through the web logging medium to keep in touch with them for marketing and requirement gathering purposes. Moreover, organisations may wish to receive advantage of social computing skills and technology in order to improve organizational information processing and knowledge management.

The respected researchers reviewed weblogs and their role as a social networking device for young people and the possible evolution of social software to the organizational computing.  A qualitative approach has been taken in this research. There were interviews with several young bloggers who are university students. The 33 interviews have been analysed and the evaluation of the fit between technology features and the needs of these web loggers are reported. Technology Task fit model is a theory that investigates the technology adopting by organisation; this theory has been adopted and modified to understand the impact of blogs on organisations in a social realm. This study found that organizational computing will take advantage of employees’ social computing expertise and acceptance and to further capture the attention of customers.

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